12/13/2022 0 Comments Champ app reservationThen came the pandemic: no in-person school or sports for over a year. Undaunted, he racked up victory after victory. He had no one to help him run faster, nobody to work in tandem with during races against schools that sometimes featured a phalanx of 10 runners. By his sophomore season, Stevens was the only member of the cross-country team. Yerington High sits in a predominantly white town of roughly 3,000 close to the reservation. He remembers that sense surge through him at age 4 in his first race, a half-mile run he sprinted the entire way. The speed and self-reliance of it made him feel free. It was near that home where Stevens fell in love with running. He died in the mid-1980s, a quarter-mile from the single-story, two-bedroom home where Stevens lives now. Quinn became a rancher, a tribal leader and a respected elder - a quiet man who refused to speak ill of anyone. Once more he fled, only to be caught and returned. There are only scant records of Quinn’s time at Stewart, but this much is known: After that first escape, government agents dragged him back. And his first escape from Stewart wasn’t the last.” He went through so much at such a young age. “When I run, I take my history with me and especially Frank Quinn. They farm alfalfa on the same land that has been a home to the tribe for centuries. A canvas-covered sweat lodge, used for ceremonies to mark the seasons, sits in the family’s backyard. “I owe him everything,” said Stevens, whose family hews closely to Paiute traditions. How he ran, using a keen memory of the topography, and somehow navigated his way home, a trip of 50 miles. How he was just 8 years old when he escaped Stewart and fled into the desert. The Paiute have passed his story through generations by word of mouth. Its graves are said to hold the remains of students who died at the school. As with many of the Native American boarding schools, a cemetery sat nearby. Corporal punishment and solitary confinement were common. Mothers and fathers traveled from tribal land and camped just outside Stewart’s sprawling campus, hoping to steal glimpses of their children. In Quinn’s era, children as young as age 4 arrived on campus after being ripped from their parents’ arms by agents of the school. “The intent was evil,” said Stacey Montooth, executive director of the Nevada Indian Commission. The boarding school was one of over 350 similar institutions across the United States created to forcibly assimilate Native Americans. At around 7 or 8 years old, he was forced to leave his parents and attend the Stewart Indian School, three miles outside Carson City and a world away from his tribe. Stevens’s paternal great-grandfather, Frank Quinn, a Yerington Paiute Indian born in the rugged Nevada desert, suffered a fate all too common for Native American children in the early 1900s. Winning would honor his tribe and his forebears, especially his great-grandfather and others like him, who endured brutal treatment at federal and church-run boarding schools and the often violent efforts to strip Native Americans of their language, religious beliefs and all other vestiges of their culture. He wanted to show that Native Americans could be champions. Though he lived on a struggling Native American reservation and participated in a sport where few competitors shared his background, he dreamed for years of being the state’s fastest high school distance runner. But Stevens ran on.Ī senior at Yerington High School in western Nevada, Ku - short for Kutoven - raced in the Nevada state interscholastic championships in early November. There was no one to push him toward the time he needed to be the best. He had no teammates and his competitors had fallen far back. The five-kilometer race’s trail climbed into the foothills. ![]() A pair of straggling spectators crossed his path, and he swerved to avoid them, nearly losing his balance, and he ran on. His feet dug into the gravel trail, his legs burned with pain, and he fought doubt.
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